2006-2005

Faculty Publications

The Urban Design Reader brings together some of the most influential writing on the historical development and contemporary practice of urban design. Emerging as a distinct field of environmental design practice in the late 1950s, urban design bridges the fields of architecture, planning, landscape architecture, civil engineering, urban development, and social science - with a focus on physical form and the social use of space. Among university programs, the design professions, interest groups and city governments around the world, the practice of urban design is recognized as a means of addressing 21st Century urban challenges. As planning and development processes have become more participatory in recent years, the number of people interested in improving the design of their cities and neighborhoods has also grown. The timeliness of The Urban Design Reader parallels recent public interest in making better cities and urban places.

Like the Greeks who sailed with Jason in search of the Golden Fleece, the new Argonauts—foreign-born, technically skilled entrepreneurs who travel back and forth between Silicon Valley and their home countries—seek their fortune in distant lands by launching companies far from established centers of skill and technology. Their story illuminates profound transformations in the global economy.

Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demonstrates these principles with abundantly illustrated examples—drawn from forty years of design and planning practice—showing how we can design cities that are ecologically resilient, that enhance community, and that give us pleasure.

Curious about how Alsop Architects managed to construct that flying, translucent rectangle at the Ontario College of Art and Design? Wonder about the sustainability of the Genzyme Building? The saying “the truth is in the details” reveals an essential quality of architectural design. How a staircase curves, a roof seemingly floats, or a concrete wall illuminates are critical questions for architects looking at or creating new work. You might forgive designers for closely guarding their signature techniques. Fortunately, editors Christine Killory and René Davids culled an amazing collection of the best trade secrets in Details in Contemporary Architecture.

Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real
By: Nezar AlSayyadRoutledge (2006)

The city and the cinema have become inextricably intertwined over the last century, with the identities of places becoming bound up in their cinematic portrayals. We have seen the landmarks of New York, London and Tokyo turn into iconic symbols of wealth, power, status, style and culture, and for the majority of people the images and sounds of movies form the only experience they will ever have of distant cities.

In 1906, San Francisco was destroyed not by the terrible earthquake of April 18, but by the fires that ensued. Yet journalists and historians then-and now-have been quick to point out the speed and supposed sloppiness with which architects and engineers rebuild San Francisco after every major earthquake. The conventional wisdom holds that corruption prevents proper seismic safety in new buildings. But those presumptions are far too sweeping, according to architecture and earthquake scholar Stephen Tobriner. In fact, for the past one hundred and fifty years, architects and engineers have quietly been learning from each quake and designing newer earthquake-resistant building techniques and applying them in an ongoing effort to save San Francisco. Bracing for Disaster is the first history of seismic engineering in San Francisco. In the language of a skilled teacher, Tobriner examines what really happened in the city's earthquakes—which buildings were damaged, which survived, and who were the unsung heroes—in a fresh appraisal of a city responding to repeated devastation.

This is a refreshing, unique, and fascinating look at how we feel about our homes, how we shape them to suit ourselves, why some homes make is feel safe and secure and at ease, and others make us paranoid and uncomfortable. This book, in my opinion, should be legally required reading for every architect, interior designer, and real estate agent. For the rest of us, it is a surprisingly interesting look at the meaning of home. Clare Cooper Marcus's extensive and detailed interviews with people living in all kinds of homes, from illegal shacks to mansions, provide eye-opening insights into what “home” is, and how to create the feeling of home for you. It's about time someone finally wrote this book!

These collected works represent twenty-five years of study of the designed landscape which the author here takes to include gardens, cemeteries, plazas and other shared spaces. Asking essential questions about the nature of order and its perception, this book includes in its impressive scope analyses of both historic and modern works with a geographical distribution that extends across Europe, Asia and North America. Treib brings his expertise to bear on a range of inter-related and mutually influential issues within the subject, taking in an assessment of the lives and contributions of a number of leading figures in the field, the contents of a landscape and the meanings ascribed to it, and a theoretical formulation of the ideas from which or by which landscape architecture is produced.

When environmental health problems arise in a community, policymakers must be able to reconcile the first-hand experience of local residents with recommendations by scientists. In this highly original look at environmental health policymaking, Jason Corburn shows the ways that local knowledge can be combined with professional techniques to achieve better solutions for environmental health problems. He traces the efforts of a low-income community in Brooklyn to deal with environmental health problems in its midst and offers a framework for understanding “street science”—decision making that draws on community knowledge and contributes to environmental justice.

Developing Around Transit: Strategies and Solutions that Work
By: Robert Dunphy, Robert Cervero, Fred Dock, Maureen McAvey, and Douglas R. PorterUrban Land Institute (2005)

For communities wrestling with growth and sprawl, traffic headaches, and low transit ridership, one of the solutions is well-planned, high-quality development around transit stations. Written by a team of experts in development, planning, and transit, this book breaks new ground by going beyond the typical formula of a master-planned mix of retail, offices, and housing to show a variety of ways to tap the vast prospects of undeveloped and underdeveloped areas around transit stations, whether large scale or small scale, downtown or suburban. Addressing the many challenges, as well as the opportunities, such sites present, Developing Around Transit offers proven strategies for dealing with the special considerations involved in developing vibrant, attractive transit districts that can revitalize deteriorating neighborhoods, provide more customers for transit, justify the transit investment, and raise property values.

During the nineteenth century, Cairo witnessed once of its most dramatic periods of transformation. Well on its way to becoming a modern and cosmopolitan city, by the end of the century, a “medieval” Cairo had somehow come into being. While many Europeans in the nineteenth century viewed Cairo as a fundamentally dual city—physically and psychically split between East/West and modern/medieval—the contributors to the provocative collection demonstrate that, in fact, this process of inscription was the result of restoration practices, museology, and tourism initiated by colonial occupiers. The first edited volume to address nineteenth-century Cairo both in terms of its history and the perception of its achievements, this book will be an essential text for courses in architectural and art history dealing with the Islamic world.